After a brief intermission, we are back with our monthly installment of Secret Recipe Club – the food bloggers version of a secret Santa club, where each month we are secretly assigned a blog to cook or bake from and then we post about our delicious finds.

This month I was assigned to Cairns Manor, a blog filled with beautiful photography and penned by a lovely woman named Jo. As usual, Jo doesn’t share all my food intolerances or preferences. But, I was still able to find a recipe or two that intrigued me. Like this one for chocolate pumpkin cheesecake bars. Does that not sound fabulous? Sadly, major recipe reconstruction would be required to make that safe for me. Or croissants? I dream of making those gluten and dairy free.

It wasn’t all about pressing my nose to the glass of the forbidden candy store, though. I love the idea of using orange in this broccoli stir fry. I always forget about incorporating orange into my savory dishes.

But, the one dish that intrigued me the most, and required the least modifications for my wacky diet, was her chocolate bananas foster ice cream. Banana soft serve is a ritual in my house. The kiddo preaches the gospel of banana soft serve to all his friends, and has created quite a few converts. So, a twist on banana soft serve? Yes, please.

The kiddo and I whipped this up last weekend. We made only 3 minor modifications – we used almond milk instead of regular milk, palm sugar instead of white sugar, and dumped the lemon juice for a splash of rum. The result? A creamy, caramely, not too sweet twist on a classic. I don’t think it will ever replace straight up banana soft serve in our hearts, but it’s a great one to add to the repertoire. And the kiddo says next time we have to try it with peanut butter instead of chocolate.

Break up bananas into 1/2″ pieces. Toss in a bowl with the palm sugar until the sugar starts to melt and fully coats the banana Place on a lightly greased or parchment-lined cookie sheet. Bake 400° F for 30-40 minutes, stirring once, until bananas are browned and cooked through.

Remove from oven, and combine in your blender with remaining ingredients. Blend until smooth, then cool for several hours or overnight in the refrigerator. Once the base is cool, pour into ice cream machine and process according to machine’s instructions.

Once frozen, you can either eat the ice cream soft serve or remove ice cream into a freezer-safe container and freeze for a few hours before serving.

Check out all the rest of the Secret Recipe Club recipes for February’s Group C:

25 Responses to SRC: Chocolate Bananas Foster Ice Cream

Deanna, this recipe seems like the next step up from my recent Caramel Coconut Chunky Monkey! You can be sure I’ll be trying this one. Not only does the photo of the final product look fantastic, but the image in my head of those sliced bananas with the palm sugar melting on them before roasting is pretty fine, too. :-) Off to check out Cairns Manor and more pretty photos!

I am so glad you were able to find something that fit in with your diet and I love that your kiddo preaches the banana soft serve gospel! And why didn’t I think to use rum? Maybe bourbon? you should also check out the Daring Kitchen website and go back to the croissant posts, we have quite a few gluten and dairy free folks and I am pretty sure i remember seeing them kick out some fantastic croissants!

I love ice cream, and this is a very interesting recipe – I had banana foster cake, but never as ice cream!
It must be challenging having to live without dairy and gluten, but it looks like you are doing a great job :-)

all the food sounds delicious and it sounds like a great blog, I’ve never tried bana ice cream before but you are quite lucky to have it pretty often, you made me change my mind about making ice cream since I don’t have an ice cream maker and I think it is quite difficult to make it the traditional way but I promise that I will try this chocolate bananas foster ice cream recipe